Pyret's syntax looks far more complicated to learn than Python's for a beginner.
Advice on learning Python efficiently
11–20 of 75 posts
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#12Looks like another clickbait. Learning a language and creating a new one are not the same.
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#13Looks like another clickbait. Learning a language and creating a new one are not the same.
Where did you get that from? I feel like we read different articles. Are you referring to the introduction where he suggests that people entirely new to programming should check out Pyret?
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#14Looks like another clickbait. Learning a language and creating a new one are not the same.
Where did you get that from? I feel like we read different articles. Are you referring to the introduction where he suggests that people entirely new to programming should check out Pyret?
Then he should have Pyret in the title here.
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#15For many years, I worked on the periphery of the programming world, but with a very superficial level of programming knowledge. I was a "webmaster" back in the mid 90s, working with simple PHP, JavaScript and VB scripts. I then went to grad school for public health and afterwards worked in several biostat-oriented research analyst roles focusing on Stata and SPSS programs.
All these jobs definitely involved a very basic understanding of programming, but I had no understanding of many important fundamental programming concepts, and had created very few programs bigger than a 1-page script.
It was only when I started to learn Python, and then C (to write Python extensions), that everything really clicked. Something about Python made it so much easier than PHP or JavaScript for me. I think Python's relative lack of glyphs, brackets, and other "syntactic noise" (my opinion only) made it much easier for me personally to grasp big picture ideas. Python also prepared me for learning C to a pretty good level (with much help from the K&R book).
These two, in turn, gave me a good foundation for branching out into other languages, eventually including functional programming languages.
But Python was with no doubt the turning point for me, and even though I do little Python work these days (ironically, I'm back to JS but at a much higher level than in the 90s), I'll always be grateful for Python.
If you've struggled with programming and haven't given Python a shot, give it a try! If that doesn't work, maybe try Pyret like this post advises (once it's stable), or maybe some lisp such as Clojure. I also know some mathematicians who struggled initially with imperative programming but then thrived with Haskell. Point is, we think in different ways, so keep trying different approaches until something sticks.
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#16Looks like another clickbait. Learning a language and creating a new one are not the same.
Where did you get that from? I feel like we read different articles. Are you referring to the introduction where he suggests that people entirely new to programming should check out Pyret?
According to the article, learning Pyret is an efficient way to learn Python. It's a misleading title.
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#17Pretty good advice, along with some good pointers about what NOT to do when learning a languages (ex. reading some instructional book cover-to-cover, forgetting most of the stuff along the way). I often suggest the read-a-chapter-write-a-program-based-on-it route, just to get the practice that is really important, and to solidify some intuition as to what the machine (whether interpreter or bare metal) is doing, and…
> Side note: While I definitely applaud the idea of trying to create a language that is geared towards beginners and good for learning on, I don't know if I can get behind recommending such a language that is still under development being suggested to beginners. I second this. Especially when python itself is very beginner friendly. IMHO the best advice on learning a skill is just do some projects with it. I am not e…
Agreed - you need to experiential context to grok the concepts about best practices. Otherwise, it is just cargo-cultism. Most the great programmers I know learn by working on increasingly more complex projects and then deep-diving into the details whenever they come across something they don't know. They make this process move faster, not by doing tutorials and writing code from scratch (after the initial bootstrapping of learning a new language/framework), but by reading code from others, especially successful project. And again diving into to understand the WHY behind the implementation and this reinforce the choice and knowledge of the HOW.
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#18Pretty good advice, along with some good pointers about what NOT to do when learning a languages (ex. reading some instructional book cover-to-cover, forgetting most of the stuff along the way). I often suggest the read-a-chapter-write-a-program-based-on-it route, just to get the practice that is really important, and to solidify some intuition as to what the machine (whether interpreter or bare metal) is doing, and…
> Side note: While I definitely applaud the idea of trying to create a language that is geared towards beginners and good for learning on, I don't know if I can get behind recommending such a language that is still under development being suggested to beginners. I second this. Especially when python itself is very beginner friendly. IMHO the best advice on learning a skill is just do some projects with it. I am not e…
I strongly agree. Dealing with a language in development is hard enough when you're an experienced programmer, I can't imagine trying to learn programming with an unstable language.
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#19>It's called Pyret. How about just learning Python instead of learning a toy language and then having to learn Python anyway?
yeah i don't think i fully understand. my first language that got me introduced to programming was python and it taught me all the basics of OOP that were important to really get me going. it's a great language with little magic. after, i moved on to java and eventually functional languages.
Re: Advice on learning Python efficiently
#20>It's called Pyret. How about just learning Python instead of learning a toy language and then having to learn Python anyway?
Especially when the python community is so incredibly helpful.
there are no stupid questions on #python on freenode IRC, and many many helpful people to answer questions in realtime